Institute For The Future

I've started reading Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things. It's one of a cluster of books on smart things, pervasive computing, and the design and social...

Cooperation lectures on YouTube

Howard Rheingold has posted at the Cooperation Commons blog a 14 minute video sequence of clips from last year's 'Literacy of Cooperation' lecture...

One of this year's Ten Year Forecast pieces deals with "dark mobs," and the complicated relationships between legitimate and illicit industries,...

Jerry Michalski and Jamais Cascio, and their phones.

Shift from mechanical/industrial to ecological paradigm is one of the keys to the intellectual history of the future....

What happens today when something goes wrong with an easy-to-use device?

The first session is a conversation with Clay Shirky.

"We're webcasting portions of todays' meeting. Download this .mov file, and open it in QuickTime on your own machine. That should get you hooked up to...

We're setting up for the conference this afternoon. This year's conference is at the San Mateo Marriott, which is your classic northern California...

Wearable computer to recognize emotion

"MIT Media Lab researchers are building a device to help autistic people determine if they're boring or annoying the person they're talking to. The...

I have been thinking a lot about new risks for women in India. The

UK pipes to be mapped in 3D

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Changing economic risk in India

Last year when I visited India for our global ethnogrpahic project, I had conversations about new economic risks with knowledge workers that almost...

Morphing materials

"MIT researchers are making strides in the development of "smart materials" that can change shape. For example, imagine an airplane wing that morphs...

Thinking about risk and trust

I recently posted a few photographs to the GEN Flickr site from my summer 2005 sojourn to China. While not specifically part of GEN research, I kept...

Virtual China blog

My colleague Lyn Jeffery, and former Institute intern Jason Li, have started a new blog, "Virtual China." The blog is "an exploration of virtual...

We may think of the joining of the physical and virtual worlds as, well, an elite activity, the kind of thing that evokes visions of bleeding-edge...

My colleague Lyn Jeffery, and former Institute intern Jason Li have started a new blog, "Virtual China." The blog is "an exploration of virtual...

Thin solar cells and LED to illuminate office complex

"onstruction company Shimizu and Sharp electronics plan to build a transparent office complex that's tricked out with thin solar panels and LEDs. The...

The end of cyberspace blog has been up for a little more than a month, and it's proving to be an interesting test-case in the utility of special-topic...

Smart lenses for super vision

"Ron Blum is an ophthalmologist who is developing eyeglass lenses that apparently can give the wearer super vision. The system is based on...

As I recently noted, my colleague David Pescovitz and I wrote a short piece for Wired titled ""Cyberspace" is Dead." In it, we asked a number of...

As part of the "end of cyberspace" Ten Year Forecast piece, Anthony Townsend and I interviewed William Mitchell on 10 November 2005. This is an edited...